Cloud computing has evolved from the hype cycle of the last few years, to being an integral part of the Enterprise IT strategy as well as a fundamental service provider offering. The types of cloud constructs have evolved as well – public, private, hybrid and community clouds are all the basic variants, with more sophisticated application-specific cloud offerings continuing to evolve.
While the journey to the private cloud has been continuing and relatively maturing, at least in the more developed countries, and public cloud services offerings are becoming relatively ubiquitous, adoption and deployment of hybrid cloud offerings have had a relatively modest uptake.
The reason for this is not because the allure of hybrid clouds is unappealing, or that it has few use-cases. It is quite the opposite. There are several use-cases all of which are applicable to real-world IT deployments today:
- Workload migration: Seamless migration of workloads from the data center or private cloud to the public cloud for better capacity utilization.
- Dev/QA operations: Testing of new applications can induce requirement for additional temporary capacity and having an extensible hybrid cloud is quite appealing, instead of investing in on-premise infrastructure.
- Cloud-bursting: To handle the needs of bursty applications, temporary capacity allocation in public cloud environments can be extremely cost-effective, providing the convenience of “infrastructure-on-demand”
- Disaster recovery: Providing data resiliency in case of failure of on-premise resources
If the use-cases are real and the benefits are so apparent, why have Enterprise not gone all out to deploy more robust hybrid clouds? Why have only few Enterprise and selective applications followed this model?
I can think of a few. To make it real, let’s consider the use-case of migrating a virtual machine (VM) from the private cloud to a provider cloud, as an example to illustrate some of the challenges:
Tags: Andre Kindness, Ayman Sayed, David Yen, Greg Sanchez, Hybrid Cloud, Kerby Lyons, padmasree warrior, Shashi Kiran, Unified Fabric, Workload Migration